At the Huffington Post, Howard Fineman is grumpy because President Obama seems to be cruising to reelection without being held accountable for parts of his first-term record:
If American democracy is to work -- if we are to prevent the blood from clotting in the body politic -- presidential elections must be real contests over real ideas and real records, informed by real facts.Who's going to hold Obama accountable on these matters? The Republicans? In every listed case, the Republican approach either is precisely what Obama has done (leaving Gitmo open, treating the bankers with kid gloves rather than demanding real concessions on mortgages) or is an undiluted version of what Obama has done in an attempt to meet the right partway, with disappointing and sometimes dreadful results.
This campaign hasn't really been any of those things....
Unless I missed it, the president has yet to give a detailed answer to why he has failed to meet or even come close to his promises about reducing the unemployment rate....
He hasn't given a detailed answer as to why he and his top advisers, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, failed to focus sufficiently on reviving the housing market, rather than just bailing out banks.
He hasn't explained why his own administration is now saying that at least 6 million Americans, most of them in the middle class, will indeed face a tax increase (penalty) in 2014 if they do not buy health insurance....
He hasn't explained whether he shares any blame for the failure of budget talks on a grand compromise....
He hasn't given a detailed defense of the vast expansion of the security state under his watch....
He hasn't given a detailed explanation for why he didn't close Guantanamo....
Regarding unemployment, Obama gave us less Keynesianism than we needed, at Republicans' insistence, yet the Republican solution is even less than that; on health care, Obama gave us a plan based on right-wing think-tank ideas and the continuation of a for-profit system, rather than single-payer, but the Republicans want the system to be driven even more by the profit motive than it already is; on the budget, we need to start by collecting more tax revenue from the rich, but teabagger Republicans were never willing to go along with a bargain with that as a feature, and now their view is holy dogma in the GOP; on national security, we've needed less bellicosity, but Republicans have never stopped demanding even more.
Obama could be challenged on all these things -- but not by the other major political party we actually have. A truly progressive major party could do so -- but we don't have one.
